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<h1>syslog-protocol support in rsyslog</h1>
<p><b><a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">Rsyslog</a>&nbsp; provides a trial 
implementation of the proposed
<a href="http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/glossary/syslog-protocol.php">
syslog-protocol</a> standard.</b> The intention of this implementation is to 
find out what inside syslog-protocol is causing problems during implementation. 
As syslog-protocol is a standard under development, its support in rsyslog is 
highly volatile. It may change from release to release. So while it provides 
some advantages in the real world, users are cautioned against using it right 
now. If you do, be prepared that you will probably need to update all of your 
rsyslogds with each new release. If you try it anyhow, please provide feedback 
as that would be most beneficial for us.</p>
<h2>Currently supported message format</h2>
<p>Due to recent discussion on syslog-protocol, we do not follow any specific 
revision of the draft but rather the candidate ideas. The format supported 
currently is:</p>
<p><b><code>&lt;PRI&gt;VERSION SP TIMESTAMP SP HOSTNAME SP APP-NAME SP PROCID SP MSGID SP [SD-ID]s 
SP MSG</code></b></p>
<p>Field syntax and semantics are as defined in IETF I-D syslog-protocol-15.</p>
<h2>Capabilities Implemented</h2>
<ul>
	<li>receiving message in the supported format (see above)</li>
	<li>sending messages in the supported format</li>
	<li>relaying messages</li>
	<li>receiving messages in either legacy or -protocol format and transforming 
	them into the other one</li>
	<li>virtual availability of TAG, PROCID, APP-NAME, MSGID, SD-ID no matter if 
	the message was received via legacy format, API or syslog-protocol format (non-present 
	fields are being emulated with great success)</li>
	<li>maximum message size is set via preprocessor #define</li>
	<li>syslog-protocol messages can be transmitted both over UDP and plain TCP 
	with some restrictions on compliance in the case of TCP</li>
</ul>
<h2>Findings</h2>
<p>This lists what has been found during implementation:</p>
<ul>
	<li>The same receiver must be able to support both legacy and 
	syslog-protocol syslog messages. Anything else would be a big inconvenience 
	to users and would make deployment much harder. The detection must be done 
	automatically (see below on how easy that is).</li>
	<li><b>NUL characters inside MSG</b> cause the message to be truncated at 
	that point. This is probably a major point for many C-based implementations. 
	No measures have yet been taken against this. Modifying the code to &quot;cleanly&quot; 
	support NUL characters is non-trivial, even though rsyslogd already has some 
	byte-counted string library (but this is new and not yet available 
	everywhere).</li>
	<li><b>character encoding in MSG</b>: is is problematic to do the right 
	UTF-8 encoding. The reason is that we pick up the MSG from the local domain 
	socket (which got it from the syslog(3) API). The text obtained does not 
	include any encoding information, but it does include non US-ASCII 
	characters. It may also include any other encoding. Other than by guessing 
	based on the provided text, I have no way to find out what it is. In order 
	to make the syslogd do anything useful, I have now simply taken the message 
	as is and stuffed it into the MSG part. Please note that I think this will 
	be a route that other implementors would take, too.</li>
	<li>A minimal parser is easy to implement. It took me roughly 2 hours to add 
	it to rsyslogd. This includes the time for restructuring the code to be able 
	to parse both legacy syslog as well as syslog-protocol. The parser has some 
	restrictions, though<ul>
	<li>STRUCTURED-DATA field is extracted, but not validated. Structured data 
	&quot;[test ]]&quot; is not caught as an error. Nor are any other errors caught. For 
	my needs with this syslogd, that level of structured data processing is 
	probably sufficient. I do not want to parse/validate it in all cases. This 
	is also a performance issue. I think other implementors could have the same 
	view. As such, we should not make validation a requirement.</li>
	<li>MSG is not further processed (e.g. Unicode not being validated)</li>
	<li>the other header fields are also extracted, but no validation is 
	performed right now. At least some validation should be easy to add (not 
	done this because it is a proof-of-concept and scheduled to change).</li>
</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Universal access to all syslog fields (missing ones being emulated) was 
	also quite easy. It took me around another 2 hours to integrate emulation of 
	non-present fields into the code base.</li>
	<li>The version at the start of the message makes it easy to detect if we 
	have legacy syslog or syslog-protocol. Do NOT move it to somewhere inside 
	the middle of the message, that would complicate things. It might not be 
	totally fail-safe to just rely on &quot;1 &quot; as the &quot;cookie&quot; for a syslog-protocol. 
	Eventually, it would be good to add some more uniqueness, e.g. &quot;@#1 &quot;.</li>
	<li>I have no (easy) way to detect truncation if that happens on the UDP 
	stack. All I see is that I receive e.g. a 4K message. If the message was e.g. 
	6K, I received two chunks. The first chunk (4K) is correctly detected as a 
	syslog-protocol message, the second (2K) as legacy syslog. I do not see what 
	we could do against this. This questions the usefulness of the TRUNCATE bit. 
	Eventually, I could look at the UDP headers and see that it is a fragment. I 
	have looked at a network sniffer log of the conversation. This looks like 
	two totally-independent messages were sent by the sender stack.</li>
	<li>The maximum message size is currently being configured via a 
	preprocessor #define. It can easily be set to 2K or 4K, but more than 4K is 
	not possible because of UDP stack limitations. Eventually, this can be 
	worked around, but I have not done this yet.</li>
	<li>rsyslogd can accept syslog-protocol formatted messages but is able to 
	relay them in legacy format. I find this a must in real-life deployments. 
	For this, I needed to do some field mapping so that APP-NAME/PROCID are 
	mapped into a TAG.</li>
	<li>rsyslogd can also accept legacy syslog message and relay them in 
	syslog-protocol format. For this, I needed to apply some sub-parsing of the 
	TAG, which on most occasions provides correct results. There might be some 
	misinterpretations but I consider these to be mostly non-intrusive. </li>
	<li>Messages received from the syslog API (the normal case under *nix) also 
	do not have APP-NAME and PROCID and I must parse them out of TAG as 
	described directly above. As such, this algorithm is absolutely vital to 
	make things work on *nix.</li>
	<li>I have an issue with messages received via the syslog(3) API (or, to be 
	more precise, via the local domain socket this API writes to): These 
	messages contain a timestamp, but that timestamp does neither have the year 
	nor the high-resolution time. The year is no real issue, I just take the 
	year of the reception of that message. There is a very small window of 
	exposure for messages read from the log immediately after midnight Jan 1st. 
	The message in the domain socket might have been written immediately before 
	midnight in the old year. I think this is acceptable. However, I can not 
	assign a high-precision timestamp, at least it is somewhat off if I take the 
	timestamp from message reception on the local socket. An alternative might 
	be to ignore the timestamp present and instead use that one when the message 
	is pulled from the local socket (I am talking about IPC, not the network - 
	just a reminder...). This is doable, but eventually not advisable. It looks 
	like this needs to be resolved via a configuration option.</li>
	<li>rsyslogd already advertised its origin information on application 
	startup (in a syslog-protocol-14 compatible format). It is fairly easy to 
	include that with any message if desired (not currently done).</li>
	<li>A big problem I noticed are malformed messages. In -syslog-protocol, we 
	recommend/require to discard malformed messages. However, in practice users 
	would like to see everything that the syslogd receives, even if it is in 
	error. For the first version, I have not included any error handling at all. 
	However, I think I would deliberately ignore any &quot;discard&quot; requirement. My 
	current point of view is that in my code I would eventually flag a message 
	as being invalid and allow the user to filter on this invalidness. So these 
	invalid messages could be redirected into special bins.</li>
	<li>The error logging recommendations (those I insisted on;)) are not really 
	practical. My application has its own error logging philosophy and I will 
	not change this to follow a draft.</li>
	<li>Relevance of support for leap seconds and senders without knowledge of 
	time is questionable. I have not made any specific provisions in the code 
	nor would I know how to handle that differently. I could, however, pull the 
	local reception timestamp in this case, so it might be useful to have this 
	feature. I do not think any more about this for the initial proof-of-concept. 
	Note it as a potential problem area, especially when logging to databases.</li>
	<li>The HOSTNAME field for internally generated messages currently contains 
	the hostname part only, not the FQDN. This can be changed inside the code 
	base, but it requires some thinking so that thinks are kept compatible with 
	legacy syslog. I have not done this for the proof-of-concept, but I think it 
	is not really bad. Maybe an hour or half a day of thinking.</li>
	<li>It is possible that I did not receive a TAG with legacy syslog or via 
	the syslog API. In this case, I can not generate the APP-NAME. For 
	consistency, I have used &quot;-&quot; in such cases (just like in PROCID, MSGID and 
	STRUCTURED-DATA).</li>
	<li>As an architectural side-effect, syslog-protocol formatted messages can 
	also be transmitted over non-standard syslog/raw tcp. This implementation 
	uses the industry-standard LF termination of tcp syslog records. As such, 
	syslog-protocol messages containing a LF will be broken invalidly. There is 
	nothing that can be done against this without specifying a TCP transport. 
	This issue might be more important than one thinks on first thought. The 
	reason is the wide deployment of syslog/tcp via industry standard.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Some notes on syslog-transport-udp-06</b></p>
<ul>
	<li>I did not make any low-level modifications to the UDP code and think I 
	am still basically covered with this I-D.</li>
	<li>I deliberately violate section 3.3 insofar as that I do not necessarily 
	accept messages destined to port 514. This feature is user-required and a 
	must. The same applies to the destination port. I am not sure if the &quot;MUST&quot; 
	in section 3.3 was meant that this MUST be an option, but not necessarily be 
	active. The wording should be clarified.</li>
	<li>section 3.6: I do not check checksums. See the issue with discarding 
	messages above. The same solution will probably be applied in my code.</li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h2>Conlusions/Suggestions</h2>
<p>These are my personal conclusions and suggestions. Obviously, they must be 
discussed ;)</p>
<ul>
	<li>NUL should be disallowed in MSG</li>
	<li>As it is not possible to definitely know the character encoding of the 
	application-provided message, MSG should <b>not</b> be specified to use UTF-8 
	exclusively. Instead, it is suggested that any encoding may be used but 
	UTF-8 is preferred. To detect UTF-8, the MSG should start with the UTF-8 
	byte order mask of &quot;EF BB BF&quot; if it is UTF-8 encoded (see section 155.9 of
	<a href="http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch15.pdf">
	http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch15.pdf</a>) </li>
	<li>Requirements to drop messages should be reconsidered. I guess I would 
	not be the only implementor ignoring them.</li>
	<li>Logging requirements should be reconsidered and probably be removed.</li>
	<li>It would be advisable to specify &quot;-&quot; for APP-NAME is the name is not 
	known to the sender.</li>
	<li>The implications of the current syslog/tcp industry standard on 
	syslog-protocol should be further evaluated and be fully understood</li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>[<a href="manual.html">manual index</a>]
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<p><font size="2">This documentation is part of the
<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog</a> project.<br>
Copyright &copy; 2008 by <a href="http://www.gerhards.net/rainer">Rainer Gerhards</a> and
<a href="http://www.adiscon.com/">Adiscon</a>. Released under the GNU GPL
version 2 or higher.</font></p>
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